Saturday, 4 June 2011

Classic Friday: Saturday Edition

Oops. Forgot to do another one of these on Friday. Sorry about that.

The following post was originally made on June 25th, 2009. It's about spiders:

As is often the case, when walking back to my room or the computer room in my household, I will see the briefest flash of a dark spot on the wall and my brain will signal that it is a gross insect. Upon closer inspection, it is usually dirt or something.

This was not the case 5 minutes ago.

This time I thought it was just a bit of dirt or something, but decided to stop and check anyway just to confirm. It was a spider, with the fattest ass I have ever seen on an arthropod. It was struggling to get out of its own web. I think it was seriously that overweight by spider standards. This thing was inches away from my face every time I walked into the computer room.

Only after acquiring 4 sheets of paper towel did I muster enough courage to vanquish the Sir-Mix-A-Lot equivalent of Grendel. Keeping in mind this is only a couple of days after watching the remake of Charlotte’s Web(the one that tries to convince an audience that a realistic spider egg sac hatching, unleashing millions of baby spiders crawling all over the face of a horse played by Robert Redford is supposed to be “heartwarming”). I nearly lost it. What if a bunch of spiders burst from it, like the world’s worst pinata?

When I removed the paper towel, there were no legions of baby spiders attempting to devour me in blind retribution. Instead the wall was smeared in a gooey, uneven line of green and brown spider-gunk that splintered my soul, and made it scream for a merciful quick death. To be released from this knowledge. It was even more grotesque and emotionally unnerving than I have made it sound. I write this in a damaged trance, and I search for something to soothe my doubts that this is still a universe worth living in.

I was going to go to sleep about a half-hour ago. I don’t think I’ll be doing that for a while.

In related horror stories of spiders, the reason I stopped eating the most delicious cereal in the world “Cinnamon Toast Crunch” is because I found a spider in it. After I’d already eaten some of the cereal, tainted by the 8-legged illegal immigrant. I had consumed the spider-milk. There’s no going back now.